Cold warriors trespassing on the roof of the world

The tale of the CIA's involvement in Tibet has all the ingredients of a great thriller, including a grimly ironic outcome for most of the participants

By Max Woodworth / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

In the early afternoon of April 29, 1950, a band of Tibetan border guards on the lookout for bandits bagged what they thought was a big prize. They had apprehended a group of five foreign-looking men shooting dead three of them and were bringing home two live prisoners.

The patting on the back stopped, though, when the guards returned to their base and were handed an urgent letter sent from the highest authorities in Lhasa ordering the safe passage of a group of five foreigners who were distinguished guests of the Dalai Lama himself.

Unwittingly the guards had killed the first CIA officer to die in the field. His name was Douglas Mackiernan and he was anxiously awaited by the Tibetan government for his anticipated help in organizing resistance against the impending Communist Chinese invasion.

The only things the guards could send to Lhasa were the two live prisoners and the heads of Mackiernan and the two other men they'd shot. They had severed the heads and stuffed them in saddle bags as prizes leaving the corpses to Tibet's vultures.

How Mackiernan came to meet this grisly fate is the subject of a fascinating new book by Nepal-based reporter and photographer Thomas Laird on the CIA's involvement at the onset of the Cold War in China's far northwest titled Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa.

The CIA's covert activity in Xinjiang and Tibet has remained one of the most protected of the agency's secrets and Laird has done a remarkable job of finding the survivors from that period and coaxing them into revealing as much as they are able or willing to recall. The result is a stunning tale of how the US and its allies in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet waged a quixotic last stand against the overwhelming tide of Mao's communist revolution.

Publication Notes:

Into Tibet: The CIA's First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa

By Thomas Laird

364 pages

Grove Press

Mackiernan was the CIA's man in Urumchi with a cover as vice-consul. Instead of the paper-pushing duties that his title would suggest, he was actually deeply involved in organizing a Kazak insurrection against the Russians, who had set up a puppet state called the East Turkestan Republic in the Altai Mountains, where the Russians were furiously trying to mine enough uranium to build the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb and crush the US atomic monopoly.

Throughout their cooperation, the CIA kept the Kazaks in the dark about the purpose of the mines, while bolstering Kazak hopes for US support in establishing an independent republic. Of course, the US was not about to get bogged down in a full-scale war in defense of the Kazaks. As soon as Russia detonated its first atomic bomb at about the same time the Chinese communist armies came sweeping into Xinjiang at the end of 1949, the US high-tailed it out of the area and Kazaks were murdered by the thousands for their resistance.

This pattern of half-hearted support and eventual abandonment leading to catastrophe for the indigenous people was soon to repeat itself in Tibet, Southeast Asia and other places where the CIA got its hands dirty.

Laird argues that Mackiernan was not a blind supporter of his agency's methods and insinuates that he may have contemplated suicide over the disastrous abandonment of the Kazaks. But he was nevertheless a faithful Cold Warrior and carried out crucial work by setting up high-sensitivity underground microphones near the border -- and possibly even inside the Soviet Union -- that pinpointed the location and size of the communist's first atomic blast in August, 1949.